Kundan Shah’s biting satire on the state of the Indian bureaucracy continues to be relevant even today

This two-disc Collector’s Edition of the cult classic features a digitally restored version of the film by the NFDC and definitely lives up to its name. A black comedy about two struggling photographers, who get embroiled in a building scandal that also involves murder, the film is also a social commentary on the state of the Indian bureaucracy. Behind all the humour, there is anger and frustration that lend the film a certain gravitas. That things still stand as they were (if not worse) 30 years ago only proves the timelessness of the plot. The film features the cream of the crop among Bollywood’s acting talents but as director Kundar Shah rightly notes in the ‘Director’s Perspective’, a 30-minute-long segment which is part of the special features in the second disc, most of them were just making baby steps in the industry then and the film could as well have failed. While this segment has Kundan, along with one of the film’s dialogue writers, Ranjit Kapoor, talking about the struggle that makers of parallel cinema had to undergo during that time to get a film made, you also wonder if a full-length commentary track featuring the duo would have been more apt — giving us more nuggets on what went on the sets during the film’s shoot.